I’ve been on a near-spiritual journey these last 8 weeks where I have transformed my productivity.
I’ve gone from taking a full week to create one newsletter to producing three articles in a single 90 minute session.
I feel like a new man with a herculean mind that continues to get sharper and stronger.
The secret came in three parts
- Humbling myself to my actual writing hours
- Gradually improving those hours
- Following strict rules for work
Follow these and turn yourself into an article printing press.
Take an honest look at how much you work
“I go to the library for 4 or 5 hours a day.” This was what a student told Jordan Peterson about his study habits.
“Okay, well, how much of that time is actually studying?” Jordan asks. After a back-and-forth, they realise that he might be at the library for four hours, but he is only studying for 45 minutes.
That’s a hell of a difference.
So, I had to examine my own work week. I was telling myself that I was writing every day, but when I opened up my Google Chrome history, it told the real story.
It looked this across a “2 hour writing session”
- Check email
- Open a Google doc
- Check Twitter
- Check email
- Try and pick a newsletter topic
- Check Twitter
- Look at my list of topics
- Surf Reddit for “ideas”
- Check email
- Check the list of topics again.
You get the picture.
I was lost in the sea of distraction and had to face facts. How long could I honestly work without getting distracted?
I checked, and at most, amongst all the distractions, I was writing for 30 minutes per day. Ouch.
I felt embarrassed and ashamed. All I could manage in a day was 30 minutes? Damn.
Figure out how much you can improve.
Cal Newport talks a lot about focus and distraction in his books and his podcast. And a question comes up again and again:
“If I want to get better at focussed work, should I practice meditation?”
Of course, I thought to myself, that’s a great way to train your brain. Newport disagreed.
He said that instead, if there is something you want to improve, work on improving that. For focused work, choose your time limit, sit and focus with a timer, and then try to improve.
This completely aligned with the rest of Peterson’s story.
The student in question went away with the agreement that he’d try to work for 60 minutes per day. He came back the next week, saying he missed a day. He worked 30 minutes for two of the days and managed a little over on the last day.
“That’s deadly,” Peterson says. It’s around a 50% increase in output over one week, so if you keep that up you’ll be unstoppable.
For me, I was lost at sea. A lot of terrible personal life events had ruined my focus, and I had to go back to basics. I settled on a 15-minute improvement per day every week. That would be my aim.
Now, I needed the rules.
The rules for improvement
- Track total minutes worked by a timer each day
- Total minutes for the week must be higher than the previous week, or the number doesn’t increase
- The timer stops when a distraction is opened
- Only focused work counts
This was surprisingly hard at first. I’d work for 10 minutes and then open Twitter on impulse. Then the timer stopped, and I had to come away from my laptop and try again for the last 20 minutes.
I also tried to be disciplined by only going on my laptop open only when I was working. My work day became:
- Open laptop
- Check what needs to be checked
- Do focussed work
- Final check
- End of workday
I felt ridiculous ending my work day after only 30 minutes of work. But starting in August, I knew if I stuck this out to the end, after six weeks, I’d be at two hours per day of focused writing.
That’s a 3X difference in weekly writing hours per week. But the difference in output is closer to 10X…
After 3 weeks, I noticed a change. The newsletter that used to take me a full week to publish was written, edited, formatted, and scheduled in one 60-minute block
What used to take me a week now took me an hour. Holy shit. This works.
My output has skyrocketed, and I feel like I’m only getting started. I went to a Starbucks while my car was being fixed and spent a single 2.5-hour session writing out a script for my podcast.
Plus, I finished feeling fantastic, not utterly drained like I normally would have.
How it looks over a week
I rarely manage the same amount of work each day. Often, I find myself doing the work across four days, or I’d have one mammoth day and one quiet day. But this is my ninth week at it, and I haven’t had to repeat a week yet.
Here’s what I’ve unmanaged this week
- Saturday – three articles written and rewrote my about page
- Monday – edited, formatted, and published four articles
- Tuesday – wrote three articles
- Wednesday – distracted by workmen at the house. No progress
- Thursday – 2 articles written, three more edited
- Friday – 2 articles edited, 6 articles published
This isn’t to mention that I also outlined a full mini course, created a presale page, and recorded a sales video.
It’s night and day compared to before and all because I trained my brain to focus.
Final thoughts
This is the meta-skill all professional writers have. They can focus in and write happily for hours on end. Without it, you get stuck paddling in place, unable to bring momentum because you can’t publish enough.
This is the second time I’ve used this protocol to reset my focus. Sometimes, terrible stuff happens in life, and you lose momentum. This system works to help you build momentum and hone your focus so you can write more in less time.
I’ve turned the full system into a mini-course you can pre-order: Focus Protocol: Learn how to write more in less time.
Much love from my screen to yours,
